


Alternative

by LieutenantStrawberry



Category: Star Trek: Discovery
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Mirror Universe, Vignette
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-13
Updated: 2021-02-13
Packaged: 2021-03-12 23:53:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,109
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29392962
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LieutenantStrawberry/pseuds/LieutenantStrawberry
Summary: Sarek muses about what the other Michael Burnham showed him about himself. Surprisingly, those visions move him more than the fact that the Emperor almost blew them to smithereens.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 6





	Alternative

**Author's Note:**

> This story is inspired by that time Mirror Sarek praised his counterpart for the great job he did raising Michael Burnham. I think it’s very likely that Voq and company died when the Emperor appeared, but in this story it is not so. I’d like to write something about Mirror Amanda and Sarek later. However, this is just a fragment focusing on Sarek thinking about what he saw about himself in Michael's mind.

Sarek watched Shukar folding clothes inside his backpack. That slight movement he was making with his antennae he interpreted it as an uneasiness of some kind. Of course, he wasn't going to ask the Andorian what he was worried about.

The tent they had been given was smaller and the things they had managed to take with them were stacked in a corner. The new location was less than ideal, but no one was complaining about it.

Everyone had been uncharacteristically quiet after the encounter with the Emperor. It was not absolute silence, but Sarek could see that most of them were moved by the experience that almost resulted in their deaths. The Emperor had been benevolent that time and only intended to blow the planet into a thousand pieces. Perhaps, she saw them as too inferior to bother to do anything else with them, no matter how much trouble they had caused her in the past.

He had heard other members of the resistance speculate about the event and why the regent had not asked for their leader's head to hang on her wall. It had been the only topic they talked about for weeks on end.

All that mattered little to Sarek. The Emperor could be exceedingly ruthless—even for a Terran—and everyone was well aware of what she was capable of when she felt like making a public demonstration of brutality.

It was evident that on that day, her eyes were on something else. Rather, on someone else, to the point where she missed a perfect opportunity to assert dominance over all the non-Terrans who were watching.

Later, Sarek understood that this someone who had caught the Emperor's attention was the other Michael Burnham. The good one. The one who was not nicknamed as The Butcher of the Binary Stars.

He breathed out softly.

Mind melds were always revealing. It allowed him to see what could not be conveyed through words. Sarek had seen so many things of a personal nature when he had to do them while serving under Voq. Sometimes he saw loved ones and was able to perceive affection, or the guilt attached to memories that seemed too mundane to him to evoke such a strong feeling as that. But he had never seen himself in anyone's mind.

That shocked him.

He had felt compassion emanating from that woman who looked exactly like one of the most bloodthirsty people in the entire Terran Empire.

After seeing inside her, Sarek glanced into her eyes for a brief second and knew that she could not be the same person who had caused so much destruction during the battle of the binary stars. Her gaze was soft and her expression, though serious, was nothing like the Terran coldness and indifference the universe knew so well.

Moreover, the gleam of surprise he saw on her face when Voq requested his presence in the tent was something a Terran would not let on.

He didn't know her at all. To Sarek, she looked like the little girl that the Emperor had sheltered under her wing and had grown up to become a sanguinary monster just like her mother.

In those fragments of an alternative existence, Sarek had not only seen Terran compassion that he believed was incompatible with the nature of that species. No, he had seen something that left him especially lost. Something that seemed like nonsense. Far more far-fetched than the possible existence of human compassion. The most shocking part had been visualizing himself with a human woman in marriage.

The woman's face did not look familiar to him at all. It couldn't be anyone he had ever met before, but he couldn't say he had seen many Terrans in his life either.

"The end meal is served," Shukar announced to Sarek.

Sarek rose from his bed, where he had pretended to meditate for the last hour and a half.

Mealtime was perhaps the only time when there was a modicum of normalcy. He was not much of a talker and at first, he found the social interaction somewhat annoying. However, having been living with beings from planets and cultures different from his own had taught him to become accustomed to otherness.

They both sat at the long rectangular table.

Sarek looked at the steaming food and then at Shukar, who seemed to be listening intently to the conversation between a Klingon boy and an Andorian woman.

He stirred the food on his plate, as his mind went back to the same thing.

During those weeks he had wasted no time in questioning the fragility of life. That was a fact, he was aware that at any moment someone could shoot him and there would not be a crumb of him left to bury. Instead, he devoted himself to trying to understand why the other Sarek—who had raised The Butcher of the Binary Stars along a human woman—had made the choices he had made.

"Are you well?"

Sarek nodded and began to eat his vegetable stew.

His eyes scanned everyone seated at the table and he wondered how many of them the other Sarek knew.

Voq was talking to Shukar in a low voice.

He hadn't vocalized it, but Sarek trusted them. Knowing that things and, more importantly, people could be the complete opposite in another realm, logical questions popped up in his mind.

_Would they be his allies over there too? Would he ever get to see that woman?_

Possibly, the rejection caused by the prospect of such close interaction with a human had its origin in his inability to relate to that species with brutality, violence and destruction. Nevertheless, when he evoked the image of that human in his mind, he did not feel that sense of alertness that the Terrans caused. He didn't see her tearing anyone's head off or covered in dried green blood like the imperial officers who roamed the surface of his planet.

He looked around, noticing that his current reality was not too far from what he had chosen in another reality. None of the people in his life were exclusively Vulcan. The importance of the species to which one belonged had long ceased to be a determining factor in forming alliances or relationships.

Perhaps, marrying a human was something he would do. Under the right circumstances, of course. Exactly the way his circumstances had led him to end up in an interspecies alliance with people he possibly wouldn't have met if the universe was different.

him to end up in an interspecies alliance with people he possibly wouldn't have met if the universe was different.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm not an English native speaker. Please feel free to point out mistakes. :)

**Author's Note:**

> I'm not an English native speaker. Feel free to point out mistakes.


End file.
